Fundamentally, the registry is like a big phone book or other table.  Each
entry has a name and a value, and if a program has the name, it can find the
value.
  There are two wrinkles to this:

1.  The names are hierarchical.  So just as you may find all of the separate
departments of a company listed in the phone book under the main entry,
groups of related registry entries can be collected under a heading.  Unlike
the phone book, these headings can be stacked many layers deep.  And a
program that knows a main heading can ask to find all of the sub-headings
under that heading.

2.  The value of an entry might be the name of some other entry to be looked
up.  These are often in the form of GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers),
which are kind of a shorthand alternative to a detailed hierarchy, for use
whn performance is critical.  COM/DCOM/ActiveX items routinely use GUIDs to
tell each other, and the OS, about themselves.

  Generally, there are two kinds of software that interact with the
registry:

1.  Registry utilities, which use the "find all entries under this heading"
functionality to manipulate any name/value pair in the registry, without
much caring what it means, and

2.  Applications, which create and manage one or more clusters of related
entries -- usually grouped under one or more layers of headings -- to store
configuration parameters which customize the operation of the software.
  The registry is only one of several places that configuration data could
be stored.  The OS and MS Office use it extensively and just about
exclusively.  Other applications may or may not.

David Gillett


On 1 Aug 2004 at 11:23, Vernon Plumlee wrote:

> I am looking for registry information...such as what are all these
> various settings attached to? What differentiates one registry setting
> from another and what is a part of which program/application/function?
> Is there any place one can go to check out what the registry listings
> are about? Or, is this info so secret nobody is supposed to know
> except the creator? TIA, Vern Plumlee

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